Happy May, dear salon friends. Here in France we enjoyed a jour férié on Wednesday, and luckily for us, it’s the first of many to come as we inch closer to summer.
On Friday night I saw a fantastic production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Médée at the Palais Garnier. William Christie’s musical direction was truly superb, and mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre was an incredible Médée. Her vocal technique was an inspiration, achieving warmth and fluidity in every passage.
For this week’s salon, I’d like to discuss Jamie McKendrick’s prize-winning poetry collection Out There (2012), focusing on its title poem. McKendrick is a tutor on the MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford, where I had the immense privilege of attending his poetry translation seminar.
As an expat, I was immediately drawn to Out There. Grappling with definitions of space, thresholds, and home, its poems take readers from distant, mysterious planets to the toad-ridden backyards of Earth. Displacements become opportunities for rediscovery: departed flood waters reveal “a question mark over the slate floor” of a house (“Après”), a door repurposed as a gate joins rather than separates two spaces (“The Gate”), a careless swim in the sea turns air into water (“The Warning”). Perspective is changed, challenged, and stretched, offering a poetry of remarkable vision.
Out There also takes readers to our beloved Salon Nouveau home, Paris, and inhabits the perspectives of other artists. The wonderful personal poem “Mademoiselle Garde” is composed in the voice of Gerda Michaelis, Chaim Soutine’s companion of several years, and there are several translations in the collection, including Baudelaire’s “Les Hiboux.”
Let’s have a look at the collection’s title poem:
“Out There”
If space begins at an indefinite zone
where the chance of two gas molecules colliding
is rarer than a green dog or a blue moon
then that’s as near as we can get to nothing.
Nostalgia for the earth and its atmosphere
weakens the flesh and bones of cosmonauts.
One woke to find his crewmate in a space suit
and asked where he was going. For a walk.
He had to sleep between him and the air-lock.
Another heard a dog bark and a child cry
halfway to the moon. What once had been
where heaven was, is barren beyond imagining,
and never so keenly as from out there can
the lost feel earth’s the only paradise.
Throughout the poem, the limitless and the defined are put in relation to one another: the very specific imagery of “a green dog or a blue moon” is used to locate “an indefinite zone,” while real “flesh and bones” are weakened by an unimaginable “nostalgia for the earth.” As a reader, I was left musing upon the proximity of seemingly distant entities in the human experience.
What I love most about this poem is where it lands. A contemporary Petrarchan sonnet, we are introduced to an enormous predicament in its first eight lines, that of space and nothingness. Turning in the final two tercets, the poem’s last three lines offer a tonal resolution, yet are equally rich in ambiguity: do we need to be lost “out there” to realize the beauty of being grounded? If we accept earth as paradise, does heaven cease to exist?
To hear the poem’s subtle musicality, do listen to this recording of “Out There” read by McKendrick himself. And for French speakers, you can read a translation by Martin Rueff in PO&SIE.
Salon friends, how did you respond to the last lines of “Out There”? How did you find the poem’s juxtaposition of the abstract and the concrete, the defined and the limitless? I’d love to discuss.
Before I set off on a big week of reading, writing, and rehearsing, some news:
First, I wanted to share our upcoming recital poster. Paysages Choisis refers to a line in Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune”: I’ll be singing Gabriel Fauré’s setting of the poem. If you’re in Paris, we’d love to see you there.
I spend every summer writing in the south of France, and I’d love for you to join me: we still have some space available for our workshops and retreats at La Muse. Check out our Instagram for more information, and do get in touch if you’re interested.
Finally, my dear friend Janet’s book is officially out in the world! Order your copy of Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade (US) / The Librarians of Rue de Picardie (UK) here.
Have a great week tout le monde, et à la prochaine !
Rachel